Thursday's best TV: Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back

F***! The f******! f*****’s f****** f*****! There, we got that over with quickly, didn’t we? No need for any more swearing today. That’s Gordon Ramsay’s poetic diction sorted.

As a concise plot summary of any one of Ramsay’s restaurant rescue programmes, this classic sentence serves very well, too.

Ramsay goes to a failing joint and finds all is far from well, expressing those findings forcefully, shall we say.

Then he sets about fixing things, using the F-word, his culinary expertise and his terrifyingly aggressive attitude.

He’s been at this game a good long time now. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares debuted back in 2004.

You might have supposed there was not a lot of mileage left but you’d have supposed wrong, for Ramsay has not mellowed with the passing years: he has only become tougher, ruder, crosser.

Back then he had just a week to de-f*** — sorry, fix up — a restaurant. Now, in this new series, he and his team get a mere 24 hours to fix apparently unfixable places, piling the pressure on, as a digital clock clicks down towards disaster. The pretext is that, in the age of social media, a restaurant can fail overnight, so you need to move quickly.

In reality, the daft deadline has been set purely to wind up Ramsay to the max — and it works a treat.

This first episode is an absolute corker. Ramsay pitches up at Bella Gianna’s Italian restaurant in Congers, New York, run by 50-year-old Vinny and his family. Ramsay’s team install secret surveillance cameras, revealing just how awful this place is and how abusive to each other the staff have become.

Then Ramsay disguises himself as moustachioed, porky, cap-wearing hick from a National Lampoon movie to try out lunch at the restaurant incognito. “May we not end up in ER,” he prays. Halfway through a disgusting meal he sheds his disguise and reveals himself to stunning effect.

“It’s Gordon f****** Ramsay!” both the staff and the diners exclaim, all apparently so floored by such celebrity they’ll do anything he asks. He closes the restaurant down forthwith.

Then Ramsay gets to work. In no time his team are renovating the dining room, while the chefs are getting high-speed cooking lessons in a giant, specially adapted truck known as “Hell on Wheels”. To increase the sense of urgency, much of this action is shown going on simultaneously, in split, or even quartered, screens.

Ramsay doesn’t just expostulate in horror at the state of the kitchen: rather impressively, he actually throws up, or makes the noises anyway, once he’s smelt the squid they’ve just been served. The core problem with Bella Gianna’s, it’s soon clear, is Vinny himself, characterised as nothing less than “a virus” by Ramsay: a pathetic man-child loser of the type usually seen only on Jeremy Kyle, unattractively combining extreme self-pity with Sopranos-style Italian-American mouthy aggression.

“I’m amazed you can stand up straight, the size of the chip on your shoulder. What is wrong with you?” Ramsay scoffs. “Resentment, anger, alienation, a lot of things,” Vinny replies, as guest of honour at his own pity-party.

But Vinny has met his match in Ramsay. The next time he kicks off — “Can I say a word?” — Gordon’s having none of it. “No! I don’t want to hear one more piece of s***.” And that’s that.

Does Bella Gianna’s make it out of hell? Up to a point. Vinny thinks, saying at the end, with undiminished self-regard: “It was a tough 24 hours for me but, all in all, I think I grew up.” The restaurant’s website reveals that it’s still in business, touted now as “a classic family-run Italian restaurant run by Vincent Vasti and remodeled by Gordon Ramsay”. F****** cheek. Sorry.

London Live

W1A - London Live, 9pm

Whatever the crisis confronting head of values Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) and his team, you can be certain they will take every opportunity to exacerbate the situation and shoot themselves in the foot.

This evening Fletcher ends up on Woman’s Hour, his first major interview since assuming his prestigious role, to defuse an argument raging over presenter Sally Wingate’s claim she’s been a victim of age discrimination. Fletcher just can’t close that Wingategate…

London Go - Tomorrow, London Live, 7pm

We MIGHT still like to be beside the seaside, even when it’s reported more species of sharks will be heading to our waters due to changing climate, but there is one aspect of the British seaside holiday which has fallen into disrepair. The humble beach shelter is celebrated in Seaside Shelters, a new exhibition at the Heni Gallery, and photographer Will Scott will join host Tanya Francis in the studio.

This week’s show will also meet Joseph Young and Peter Faulkner Murphy, the pair behind new event Make Futurism Great Again, and there’s a peek at the V&A’s Frida Kahlo exhibition.